Under the Skin
by lionesseyes13
Summary: Mac's perspective on the moments leading up to and following his confrontation with Herb in the locker room during the game against Sweden.
1. Chapter 1

Bruised Flesh

Thinking wistfully of putting an ice pack on the throbbing thigh that blazed as though it had been replaced by a seething volcano on the verge of spewing fiery lava into the stratosphere, Rob McClanahan hobbled into the locker room. Even as he limped, with Doc's arms supporting him every inch of the way, over to the metal table where Doc could perform an examination, he told himself this wasn't happening to him—just to some doppelganger who shared his name and body. As Doc hoisted him onto the table, Mac assured himself with enough authority that he could almost believe it that this wasn't the Olympics—just another exhibitation game—and that he wasn't injured in his very first period of his opening game. He had stereotypical Irish luck, which was no fortune at all really except bad, but, surely, his mother had ensured that he had been dragged to church enough times for God to not despise him _that _much.

"What have you done to yourself now, Mac?" Doc asked with the almost angelic patience of a man who had long ago ceased asking himself why he made a career of patching up impulsive college boys between periods when, less than fifteen minutes later, they'd be out their beating themselves against boards, sticks, and other players. Doc was that rarest of creatures in the medical profession capable of ministering to the physical and emotional wounds of his patients without judging them.

"You'll have to tell me," Mac muttered, as he peeled away layers of clothing and pads to allow Doc a look at his flaming leg, and bit back a curse that would have been guaranteed to make God hate him even more, because anything, even his pinky finger, brushing against his thigh, made him want to rip it off to spare himself more pain. "You're the doctor."

There was silence for a long moment, as both of them examined the bruise that had swallowed Mac's thigh. Every cell in an area the size of a balled fist was swollen black and blue. Numbly, Mac tried to feel some gratitude that at least all that bleeding was going on under his skin, but all he could think was that his thigh had morphed into an inkblot test psychologists used to uncover the secret neuroses of their clients.

"That's quite a shiner you've got there—an upper leg contusion." Doc sighed. Gingerly, he pressed his fingers against the bruise, and shook his head when Mac couldn't stifle a gasp. "I'm afraid you'll have to spend the rest of the game on the bench. If you skate on your leg tonight, you'll be in constant pain, and you won't be able to do anything to help your team. Just put a lot of ice and medical tape on your thigh tonight, and tomorrow we'll get you treatment so you can be able to play in the next round."

Mac hesitated, his common sense warring with his ego. His pride screamed at him that he should be out on the ice, injured or not, speeding past opponents in an eye blink and heating up the ice by firing shots on goal. Even louder, his logic shouted that he would skate like a cripple, becoming more of a hindrance than a help to his team, if he tried to play with a bruise larger than the Soviet Union on his thigh. Now, more than ever, he would have to surrender his need to be the star for the good of his team, because, if he didn't, he would just be a liability on blades.

"All right," he answered at last, wishing that his leg was made of steel, not flesh and blood, so that he and Doc would never have to have this conversation about his sitting out his first Olympic game. "Whatever you say, Doc."

"Here's an ice pack." Briskly, Doc removed an ice pack from his bag, snapped it to activate whatever chemical reactions made it cold, wrapped it in a towel to eliminate the chance of frostbite, and dumped the swaddled ice pack into Mac's outstretched hand. "Look on the bright side. At least you and OC can keep one another company."

"That's more of a cloud than a silver lining," Mac responded, rolling his eyes more on the principle that he could never act as if he liked that particular Massachusetts native, even if he did. There were a few things in the world that two people who had daydreams about disemboweling each other could survive together to develop a mutual respect and affection, and doing endless Herbies in a dark Norway rink was one of them. Solidarity started around the same time as the wheezing and vomiting did. "There's definitely a thunderhead on the horizon if OC and I are supposed to spend quality time together."

Doc chuckled, doubtlessly mentally throwing his arms up over the petty rivalries of hockey teammates, as Mac pushed himself off the table, and, deriving some relief from the clash of his hot bruise against the cold ice pack, stumbled into the part of the room where the team changed into and out of their equipment. Hoping that numbness would set in soon to replace all the pain, Mac headed toward his bench.

"What did Doc say?" asked Mark Johnson, who was center on the first line where Mac was a left winger, eyeing him as anxiously as if he carried news about an impending airstrike.

"I can't play." Mac pressed his lips together, telling himself that he wasn't going to cry even though this was the Olympics and he wouldn't be able to play in most of the game that would determine all the match-ups for the rest of the competition. Even though, after months of hard training, he was expected to sit on the bench while his teammates played a game that, if they lost, would pretty much eliminate them from any contention for even a bronze medal. After playing for Herb Brooks for four years, Mac knew that tears were only acceptable in the locker room if your head had recently suffered an unpleasant divorce from your shoulders, and it would be just his luck if Coach Brooks burst into the locker room just at the moment Mac had a meltdown.

"Who do you think Herb will put on our line?" Mark whispered, grabbing Mac's elbow and escorting him over to his cubby.

"My money is on Silk," Mac whispered back, trying not to feel like a drunkard being escorted home after getting a little too lost in the Guinness. He thought that, early in the period, when Strobel, one of Mac's old teammates from the U, was faltering—showing the patented Strobel streakiness that, for instance, allowed him to be a major factor in the semifinal of the 1979 NCAA Championships only to arrive in body but not spirit for the final, and that drove Herb to spitting fury—Herb had looked at Silk as if he were considering elevating the BU boy to the first line. Now, it looked like it would be him, not Strobel, who would be replaced, at least for tonight, by Silk. Vaguely, Mac contemplated whether Olympic triumph and failure was always separated by as narrow a margin as the second it had taken for him to be injured. One minute, he had been skating as fast as he always had, and the next, he had been left with an aching bruise where a strong thigh should have been.

"Bad luck about you not being able to play tonight, Mac," commented Strobel, shaking his head sympathetically as Mac sank onto his cubby, stretching his leg out because he couldn't bear to bend it.

"This whole game is bad luck," grumbled Steve Christoff, another one of Mac's old teammates from the U. "What moron in the Olympic Committee decided that we should have our opening match against Sweden, while Soviet Union gets to go on a walk in the park crushing Japan? How is that fair? Talk about losing the home rink advantage. I bet whoever put us up against Sweden in the first round also was the look-out at Pearl Harbor, and you can ask the brave men aboard the USS Arizona how well that turned out."

"You know the team face-offs are all randomly determined," Rizzo said firmly, wearing his best calm captain expression. "Anyway, let's not complain about things we can't change. We just have to focus on doing our best next period, because that's all we can control."

"Did you get that gem off the back of a Wheaties box?" snorted Steve, as aggressive off the ice as he was on it.

"Stow it," hissed Mac, who had heard the dulcet tones of Coach Brooks arguing with Doc and realized that, within seconds, Hurricane Herb would be storming into the locker room, ready to scorch the ears of his unfortunate players. When Steve glared at him instead of Rizzo, Mac continued tartly, "If we're luckier than we've been all night, we have one minute to prepare ourselves before Herb comes tearing in here, ready to draw blood. Now is the time to act our most apologetic and hope for the best. Remember, nothing says repentant like a stunned and silent locker room."

"Yeah," Mike Ramsey, another one of the boys from the U, chimed in, looking pointedly around the locker room. "Don't speak to Herb unless he asks you a direct question you can't avoid answering, and even if he does, keep your answer as short as possible, so that he has less to poke at you about. Believe me, we don't want to add any more fuel to his Olympic fire."

There was a scattered murmur of agreement from various cubbies, and the team had just enough time to settle into a tableau of shame, Mac hunching over his injury with what he hoped would be a suitable level of abasement, before Coach Brooks stalked in, tirade already in full swing.

"This is unbelievable!" he snapped. "You guys are playing like this is some throwaway game up in Rochester."

Here, he paused, and Mac, staring harder than ever at the ice pack on his thigh as if it had the power to take him away from the wrath of Herb Brooks, could picture him searching for a target.

A second later, Mac knew that Herb had found one, because he heard Coach Brooks roar, "Who we playing, Rammer?"

"Sweden," replied Ramsey as quickly and as flatly as possible, as if a correct answer could somehow appease the raging Hurricane Herb.

"Yeah, you're damn right! Sweden!" Herb upended a metal table, spilling cups of water all over the floor, and the whole team flinched. This, Mac thought, would go down as one of the most terrible of the infamous Herb Brooks Locker Room Explosions. Even innocent inanimate objects would be nothing more than collateral damage in a mad coach's war against his players. This would be even worse, Mac sensed with a sinking feeling, then the time that Herb, furious at how his Minnesota boys were celebrating their university record of eight goals in a period after a sound defeat of Michigan Tech, had hurled a keg of soda across the locker room, narrowly missing Strobel who had been emerging from the shower, shouting about how they had angered an excellent hockey team that would be seeking revenge in the next match. Of course, Mac supposed that he should be grateful. Some of his friends who had been on the soccer team at the U had horror stories about their coach throwing balls at players hard enough to leave bruises, and other friends on the tennis team at the U suffered blows to their heads with racquets when their coach felt their performance was particularly dismal. Mac had long ago concluded that there was no coach at the college level who had any kind of success without brutalizing his players, so he could only take some comfort in the fact that Herb at least limited his abuse to the verbal and emotional. "In the Olympics!"

Wishing that the floor would open up and gobble them all, Mac saw Herb's legs moving as he paced the locker room like a caged lion, seeking another scapegoat. When he had been a freshman at the U, Mac had assured himself that he would get used to these locker room fiascos, but that had never happened. He still felt as cowed as he had the first time he had ever heard Herb yell, and he still found every nerve in his body tingling as he prayed that he wouldn't be the victim in this latest drama. An awful, cowardly part of him hoped that Herb would pick on somebody else—anybody but him—even though everyone in this locker room was a friend who had become like family over the past few months that had led here to Lake Placid. He hated that part of himself right now almost as much as he hated Herb Brooks for having the power to enter a locker room and crush the soul of everybody inside it.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Herb snarled, and Mac didn't even have to glance up to know with a certainty that brought his heart plummeting to the ground that Coach Brooks was addressing him. Yet, he looked up, anyway, unable to hide his feeling of betrayal. Mac knew that there were plenty of Division I coaches who took a player's injury as a personal affront and pushed the walking wounded back onto the front lines even at the risk of aggravating the damage, but he hadn't thought that Herb was among that nefarious group. Never had he seen Herb kick an injured player when he was down—if anything, Herb was prone to threatening opponents who fouled his players or refs who didn't call penalties on competitors who hurt members of his team. This realization that Herb didn't have the backs of injured players, after all, was far more painful than the bruise on his leg, and he didn't know how to react.

He wanted to retort—to say something as bitingly honest as any Brookism like _"I have PTSD from playing with you for four years" _or to shoot the puck back into Herb's zone with _"What the hell is wrong with _you? _Why are you so misanthropic?"_—but his mouth had gone drier than Death Valley.

That meant that he could only remain quiet as Herb ordered ruthlessly, "Put your gear on."

Mac didn't move. He wasn't stupid enough to play on a leg that he could barely walk on, because he wasn't smoking whatever drug was tainting Herb's judgment. Maybe if he didn't say or do anything, Herb would pick on somebody else. That was the only—admittedly dim—ray of hope that Mac had of surviving this confrontation.

"I said, 'Put your gear on,'" Herb repeated in a tone that Mac had learned to obey without questioning. If Herb Brooks told you to jump in that voice, you didn't waste time asking how high. You just leapt into the air as swiftly as you could with all the energy you could muster and hoped that your jump was high enough to please him. You didn't give him any rubbish about being afraid of heights or having vertigo. But what if your leg was hurt so badly that you couldn't jump? What did you do then?

As he often did when he had no idea what to do, Mac tried to imagine how his parents would behave if they were in his unenviable position. He could just hear his father, a defense attorney who sincerely believed that Mac's problem was a reluctance to defend himself, say sternly, _"You've got to stick up for yourself, Rob, or people will run over you all the time." _And he could imagine his mother, who still had no idea how much cursing went on in locker rooms, telling him gently, _"You just have to be calm and rational, Rob."_ Deciding that a bit of calm self-defense might be in order before he was trampled over in Herb's newest burst of insanity, Mac, unable to restrain a frustrated wave of his hand, said as levelly as he could, "Doc told me I can't play."

_That should be enough to make Coach Brooks see reason_, Mac thought. _He respects Doc, so he won't make me play when Doc says I shouldn't. That would be too crazy even for Herb._

"Yeah, I know." Herb was at his most derisive now. "You got a bad bruise."

Glaring at Herb, Mac fought the urge to march across the room and give the man who was so scornful about his swollen thigh a thick lip. Then Herb might not be so quick to run his mouth about bad bruises.

"You know what?" Herb jabbed a finger at Mac, while shooting him a dismissive look as though he ranked just below a snail on the totem pole of being. "Put your street clothes on 'cause I got no time for quitters."

Even under the ice pack, Mac could feel his blood boiling. Nobody had ever called him a quitter before, since he was the type of perfectionist who put one hundred-and-ten percent into brushing his teeth and hair in the morning, even if it drove his roommate mad. Before every hockey game, he meticulously taped and re-taped his stick until he was satisfied that his equipment was as ready as he could possibly make it, and, during a game, he skated with all the tenacity and speed in his body whether his team was winning or losing. After he had given every ounce of heart, sweat, and blood that he had to Herb Brooks over the past four years, it made him want to find some more furniture to throw around the room to hear his hard work ignored so casually. Herb Brooks, of all people, should have known that Mac was no more a quitter than Marilyn Monroe was ugly.

As Herb spun on his heel in a way that would have made it plain even to a goldfish that he had deemed Mac utterly unworthy of his attention, Mac couldn't help but stare after him. The temperamental side of him, inherited from Irish ancestors who spent centuries staging futile revolts against English invaders, longed to stalk out of the room and call Herb's bluff. There would be no Olympic medals for Herb Brooks if his roster was reduced to eighteen players, two of whom were goalies, until OC could play again in at best a week. He wanted Herb to recognize that he was finally tired of being shouted at and pushed to the breaking point, waiting for a compliment or an approving smile that he was sure would never come. But there was the rest of the team to think of—a team that deserved better than to be abandoned just because of a psychotic coach—and there was still a part of him that cared about what Herb thought: that needed to prove that he would not quit any time before Armageddon. And that, he decided, was the worst cruelty of Herb Brooks; it was never as easy for you to just walk away from him as it was for him to just turn his back and leave you.

"Come on, Herb." Anger honed Rizzo's Boston accent, and Mac noted that it was ironic that it was a BU boy, not one of his old teammates from the University of Minnesota, who came to his defense. Mac knew that, as long as he lived, he would never forget that it had been Rizzo who spoke up for him when he no longer knew how to protect himself from Coach Brooks' barbs. "Nobody's quitting here."

"You worry about your own game." Hands on hip, Herb strode over to Rizzo to deliver this passing shot, and Mac found himself flooded with a surge of loathing for this coach who reprimanded a captain for doing his job—looking after his players and being their voice when they couldn't speak. "Plenty there to keep you busy."

Stung, Rizzo looked away and made no further attempt at defending himself or Mac, because he had to see that any more protesting was just going to make an already volatile situation worse. Mac himself didn't feel like arguing anymore, either. He was too emotionally invested in this team to leave during the first Olympic game, and he wasn't going to let Herb think he was a quitter. He was going to prove Herb wrong even if all that kept him on the ice was determination and a burning hatred of his coach. That might mean losing the battle about whether he would play on an injured leg, but it would mean winning the far more important war about whether he was a quitter. Bracing himself with the reminder that he was going to have to get used to moving through searing pain in his leg, he twisted around, put his feet on the floor (an action that reverberated up his thigh with enough force to make him wonder why floors always had to be so hard), and bent over to grab his gear.

With any remotely sane coach, that would have been the end of it—Mac was going to play even if he had to hop around on one skate like a spastic ostrich trapped in the Arctic—but Herb could no more resist flogging a dead horse than he could live without breathing.

"A bruise on the leg is a hell of a long way from the heart, you candy-ass," Herb scoffed, his under-the-breath comment clearly intended to be heard by the locker room in general and Mac in particular.

Mac could feel his entire body beginning to tremble in ire. Herb's final insult might not have meant very much to someone raised outside of the St. Paul area, but to any native of that region it simmered with class conflict. Candy-ass, like cake eater, was slang for anyone from a sufficiently upper crust background who was perceived as lacking in the guts department. It was the equivalent of calling someone from a blue-collar neighborhood white trash, except the accusation was rooted in supposedly having too many advantages, not too few.

"What'd you call me?" Mac demanded, glaring furiously at Herb's retreating back. It wasn't his fault that he had been born in North Oaks, a prosperous suburb above St. Paul that was still listed as part of that city, where doctors and lawyers made their homes in a safe community with good schools, while Herb had been brought up in the distinctly working class East Side of St. Paul.

_Don't get regional_, Mac thought bitterly. _That's what Herb told us when players from Minnesota and Massachusetts couldn't get along. He said we couldn't afford to be provincial if we wanted a medal, and here he is thinking he's too good to work with someone from a different side of the same city he's from. Then he has the nerve to act like _I'm _the snob. _

"You heard me," Herb tossed over his shoulder, his contemptuous voice making it clear that he regarded Mac as the spoiled, rich boy who couldn't be counted on to do anything more onerous than tell the difference between the salad, dinner, and dessert forks at a fancy eatery.

"You want me to play, huh?" Mac snapped, hurling his ice pack to the floor, where it landed with an eminently satisfying thud, and surging to his feet on a burst of adrenaline that temporarily dulled the pain pounding in his thigh. Determined to do whatever he had to do to prove to his coach that it was a person's character—which could be created at least as well in a suburb as it could in a slum—rather than the size of their bank account that mattered, he stalked up to Herb, wishing that his gait could be more steady. Thinking that, if he wasn't madder than a hornet with a threatened honeycomb, he might have found it almost euphoric to finally shout at the man who had gotten into his face all too often over the past four years, Mac continued to scream, "Is that what you want?"

"I want you to be a hockey player!" roared Herb, whirling around to shove a finger in Mac's face, and Mac, drowning in resentment, knew exactly what his coach wanted. He wanted Mac to play on one leg because he was a _hockey player_. He wanted Mac to dislocate his shoulder, pop it back in, and come charging out for the next shift because he was a _hockey player_. He wanted Mac to get his bell rung in a fight and be ready to drop the gloves again two minutes later if necessary because he was a _hockey player_.

"I am a hockey player!" Mac exploded, and even though he was normally a player who had to kill the penalty minutes teammates got for being enforcers on the ice, he could feel his whole body preparing to take a swing at Herb. There were only so many years of abuse and humiliation that he could be expected to tolerate without throwing a punch, and then assault, as far as he was concerned, became justified rather than criminal.

His team seemed to feel differently, because Johnson and Silk leapt up to grab his arms, and, before he knew what was happening, he was surrounded by a mass of teammates that he could no more escape from to punch Herb than he could develop a cure for cancer by himself. Knowing he was hysterical but too angry to care, he shouted with more force than he had ever realized his lungs could handle, "You want me to play on one leg, huh? I'll play on one leg!"

As Herb walked out, infuriating Mac even more by not even sparing a glance over his shoulder at the chaos he was leaving in the locker room, Mac, desperately attempting to twist out of the collective grasp of his team, snarled, "Let me go."

When none of the hands holding him slackened, Mac, not ready to surrender the battle yet, yelled after Herb, "That make you happy, huh, Herb? I am a hockey player!"

"We know that, Robbie," said Phil Verchota, who had also been a teammate of Mac's at U. Verchota was a gentle giant prone to forgetting to remove his gloves when he got into fights on the ice, and, although he was a regular target for Herb's acerbic comments, he was perfectly composed as he went on, "Just let it go, okay? We don't want you to blow a major artery."

"I don't want to let it go." Stubbornly, Mac shook his head. "I want to show our jerk of a coach that I am a hockey player even if it's the last thing I do."

"Herb knows that already," Steve put in, all earnestness, and Mac, turning to look into his supportive face, thought that he could never have endured so many years of Herb Brooks' harsh coaching without Steve Christoff. When they had arrived at the U as freshmen, they had been rivals remembering their faceoff in the high school state tournaments the year before they went to college, but they had quickly become friends, whispering complaints about Brooks as he prowled along the bench behind them and giving each other nudges in the ribs when neither of them thought that they had the strength to go on after a grueling practice. When Herb attacked, drawing blood, they healed one another's wounded pride, and during his rants, they would catch each other's gaze whenever they dared, feeling safer united in the face of Herb's rage than they could have ever felt apart. "He is just trying to get under your skin. You know that, Robbie, because that's the default Brooks' style of motivating players."

Mac closed his eyes, and tried to cool his flaming mind enough to see that Steve was right, but all he could think was that getting under the skin summed up what Herb did to his players with amazing accuracy. Under the skin. Like a bruise. Herb knew how to hit a player with enough force to bleed but not break skin, leaving an aching bruise wherever his words touched. Under the skin. Like a splinter that could never be removed. Under the skin. It was a remarkable thought: that someone could affect you so deeply that they'd always be a part of you even if you wished that they weren't, and that you wouldn't be who you were if they hadn't infiltrated your very being, even if you hated the person that they, like a virus in your bloodstream, had turned you into.

When Mac didn't say anything, Steve tried again, "Herb chose you to play for him at the U and at the Olympics, remember? He wouldn't handpick you for two of his teams if he didn't think you were a hockey player. I mean, fool him once about being a hockey player, shame on you. Fool him twice, shame on him."

"Well, I'm not fooled by him," muttered Mac, rolling his eyes. "If you ever catch me waxing on about the joys of playing for him, just show me some of the scars we all have from serving as his whipping boys whenever it suits him. That'll set me straight."

"Maybe you're looking at this the wrong way," suggested Janny, who could always put a charitable spin on anyone's behavior, even if the person was blatantly unworthy of such generosity. "I think Herb knows that he can't win a medal in this Olympics without you playing in every game, and perhaps this locker room meltdown is his way of telling you that he doesn't even want to try to win here without you."

"Then why couldn't he just say so? Did the cat suddenly get his tongue?" Mac snorted, releasing the bitterness that he knew most of the boys who had played for Brooks at the U when they had won a third NCAA championship for him and he couldn't even bring himself to tell them that they had done a good job had felt. "He's honest to the point of being abrasive the rest of the time."

"Um, you just answered your own question," pointed out Ramsey in his most helpful, matter-of-fact manner. "Because Herb Brooks wakes up, looks in the mirror, and asks himself why he would be encouraging or supportive with us when he could be a total ass instead?"

"I've never been more humiliated in my life," Mac said, not caring if he did sound like a pampered, rich kid. Where he was from, gossip could be vicious, but people didn't publically treat one another like dirt. The court of public opinion in North Oaks tended to be quick to indict anyone who didn't have the sense to veil their cruelty with a smile. People in his hometown could be vultures, as beings could be anywhere else, but they had to at least pretend to respect each other. Just because Herb Brooks had been raised in the East Side of St. Paul to say whatever he liked to whomever he felt like without considering what company he was in, that didn't mean that Mac had to be comfortable with being called a quitter in front of his entire team for the crime of icing an injured leg. "I'm a human being, and I've given as much as anyone on this team. I don't deserve to be treated like his personal punching bag, and neither does anybody else here."

"Mac." Rizzo seemed to feel it was safe to try to take command of the situation now that Mac had stopped screaming and struggling. "I understand that you're embarrassed and hurt by what Herb said to you, but you have to know that all of us are going to support you completely on the ice. None of us thought that it was funny to watch him ripping into you like that, or that he was right to yell at you for being injured. We thought it was pretty scary and sick, actually, and, whatever we do on the ice tonight will be for you, not for him."

"I hate him." Mac gritted his teeth, even though he knew that his feelings toward Herb Brooks were more complicated than that. Most of the time, Herb held himself aloof from his players, forcing them to find affection and approval in their teammates instead of him and become more than a team in name alone, but sometimes his frosty exterior would melt a degree. When he gave a slight, involuntary smile at one of the boys' quips, when he patted someone on the shoulder for a particularly nice goal, or when he just gave a curt nod when a player offered a correct response to a pointed question, it was hard not to experience some affection for Herb Brooks in addition to the absolute esteem that everyone who played for him inevitably felt. "He's the worst coach I've ever had."

Once again, Mac knew, even as he spoke, that the truth was more complex. Herb might have been the only coach that Mac had ever feared, but he also encouraged fast, creative hockey, changing forever the way Mac viewed and played the sport. Herb was a dreamer who always provided his team with a definite vision to guide each game and every season. At the most important moments, he could pull greatness from any player, and, when you were on his team, you felt like you were a soldier in his army and were confident that you wouldn't lose because of any poor decisions he made in the deployment of his troops. Playing for him took a thick skin and firm discipline, Mac would be the first to acknowledge that, but if you could absorb his hard lessons, you would grow, however painfully, as a player. With Herb Brooks as your coach, whatever didn't kill you really would make you stronger. Ultimately, Mac would have to concede, at least to himself, that Herb Brooks was probably the best coach he had ever had, though that was by no means the equivalent of favorite coach.

"Keep your head up, Mac." That was Coach Patrick, who had unobtrusively been cleaning up the water Herb had spilled and uprighting the table Herb had flipped in his towering temper. Mac didn't even start as he noticed Patrick's presence because it had been a long time since anyone on the team bothered censoring their speech in front of Patrick. Shooting Mac an encouraging smile, Patrick added, "Just do your best on the ice, and everything will be fine."

"Yes, Coach." Mac nodded, and, his throat tightening, he realized with a pang that Patrick reminded him of the first coach he had ever had, who had only cared about his boys having fun on the ice and who had taken his team out for pizza whenever they won a game, celebrating those little victories with more enthusiasm than Herb would display if, by some miracle, this 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team managed to medal.

Swallowing, Mac thought that he missed the days when hockey had just been about having fun soaring along the ice and scoring goals. Somehow, by the time he had reached high school, the focus had shifted from enjoyment to winning, and everything had been about competing for spots on Division I teams. Then, when he had coveted place on the University of Minnesota hockey team, there had been the delight of being allowed t play with more creativity and speed—which made him feel freer on the ice than he ever had before—but there had also, for the first time, been a snaking fear of losing and what punishment Herb Brooks might exact from him and his team if they failed to win. Since his freshman year at the U, Mac had grown so accustomed to skating with this constant, humming anxiety that it was hard to remember what it had been like to play hockey without that steady, background fear.

Now, the stakes for failure were higher than ever. He was representing his country in the Olympics, so every mistake he made wasn't just an embarrassment to him—it was one to his whole nation. Although he wasn't insanely patriotic, he didn't particularly want to disgrace his country on home soil. Somehow, he would have to carry not only his own weight on his injured leg, but also the weight of his team and country. It wouldn't be painless, but he would be stronger than the pain.

"We'll make this work, Rob," Rizzo assured him, perhaps seeing the resolve finally completely replacing the rage on Mac's face. "Even if you can only give us twenty second bursts."

"I can take full shifts," Mac replied firmly, crossing the locker room to put on his gear and thinking grimly that he would sooner burn for eternity in the ninth circle of Hell than look like a weakling by asking Herb Brooks for shortened ice time.

"I'll be right there on the ice with you if you need me," Mark said, handing Mac his pads. "Just look over your shoulder."

"Don't worry about me." Mac forced a smile as he tightened his gear. "The way I'm feeling right now any Swede who messes with me will regret it until his death."

"There's nobody in the world I'd rather have as my left winger tonight, you know, Robbie." Mark was grinning, but his eyes were serious.

"Well, there's no one I want centering me more than you." Mac's smile didn't feel as fake now, because he was starting to remember that he really was part of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, and that was a footnote in history that nobody, not even Herb Brooks could take away from him. That fact would always bind him to the boys in this locker room, even if he never saw some of them again after the Olympics ended. He was a player on a team larger and more magical than himself, and he would fight to keep that team in any game as long as he could stand.

"We're a pair of shooting stars." Mark's face was shining with mischief now. "They'll never catch up to us now."

'


	2. Chapter 2

Swollen Pride

The adrenaline was fading away now, and all Mac could focus on was the pain in his thigh as he hoisted himself up onto the steel medical table so Doc could examine him again. He stretched his leg out, because he couldn't bear keeping it bent right now any more than he could tolerate sitting on the bench between shifts. His thigh, swollen worse than ever now, had hurt too much for him to do anything but stand—as far away as possible from Coach Brooks—between shifts, but when his line was on the ice, he could chase away the pain with his fierce pride that he was skating better than he had believed possible on a leg that seemed to be one big bruise.

He had played well tonight, showing Herb that he wasn't a quitter or a spoiled, rich kid, and his team had tied Sweden. They had survived to fight another day, and that was no small triumph given the lukewarm start they had opened with in the first period. Yes, they would have to win the game against Czechoslovakia two nights from now, which was a skyscraper high order, but a thousand mile journey had to begin with a single step, which was just as well, given that Mac did not want to imagine taking much more than one step at a time with his aching thigh.

"Did I make my leg worse by playing on it, Doc?" he asked, staring into Doc's face as the man scowled down at his bruised thigh. Mac had decided to view it as entirely his choice to play against Sweden after his injury, rather than as something Herb had bullied him into doing, since he had discovered that a trick to enduring Brooks' brutal coaching as finding opportunities to perceive yourself as an empowered survivor instead of a hapless victim.

"No." Doc pursed his lips as he placed an ice pack on Mac's throbbing thigh. "You caused yourself a lot of suffering I would have sooner seen you live without, but you didn't aggravate your injury."

"I should have asked you if I could damage my leg more by playing before I went back onto the ice." Mac bit his lip as the idiocy of his impulsive decision to keep playing despite the medical advice he had received washed over him. "I shouldn't have let myself be baited into without knowing that it was safe for me to go back into the game."

"I would never let you play, even in the Olympics, if you were in danger of aggravating an injury," Doc assured him firmly, eyes locking on Mac's. "And you know that Herb would never demand that you make an injury worse by playing on it."

"I know that he'll do whatever it takes to give us the best chance of winning a medal," countered Mac dryly, thinking that his trust in Herb Brooks had died in the locker room after the first period in this game against Sweden. "He'll mess with our minds. He'll call us every name in the book, and invent some that aren't just to make us feel worse. He'll push our bodies to the limit in practice. Really, it was only a matter of time before he realized that he could also goad us into playing injured."

"Mac." Doc sighed as he pulled out a roll of medical tape and removed the ice pack from his patient's leg. "Herb went after you in the locker room tonight because he knew how tough you are, not because he doubted it, and when he accused you of being a quitter, what he really meant was that he knew that you would never give up on anything."

"Everyone keeps saying things like that as though I should be comfortable with someone calling me a quitter and a brat as long as that person doesn't actually think that I'm either of those things." Mac's jaw clenched. "Well, I'm not fine with that. I think it's horrible to call someone a quitter or a brat when that is what you're thinking, but I believe it's even worse to fling those sort of insults when you don't feel they're true."

"I'm not saying that you have to be okay with what happened in the locker room, but I just don't want you beating yourself up, convinced that Herb sees you as a whiny weakling when he doesn't." Doc extended the medical tape toward Mac, asking, "Do you want me to tape your leg, Rob, or would you prefer to do it yourself?"

"I'll do it myself, thanks," answered Mac, because he was meticulous about tape. If the layers weren't perfectly even, he had to rip them off and start again. He saw no reason to inflict his obsessions and compulsions on the innocent team doctor.

"All right. Make sure you wrap your leg tight enough so you have support but loose enough that your circulation isn't cut off," Doc advised, dumping a pair of scissors on the table before Mac. "You can use these to cut off the tape when you're done wrapping your leg. Holler if you need any help."

Doc had barely disappeared around the corner and Mac had just begun spiraling the tape around his bruised thigh when the man whom Mac least wanted to see at the moment, Herb Brooks, entered the locker room and strode brusquely over to the table where Mace was ministering to his leg, announcing in a voice as sharp as new skate blades, "We need to talk, Rob."

Mac, longing to say that they didn't need to talk ever again even if they were the last two people on Earth after a nuclear fallout, bit back the bitter words. With an incredible effort, he reminded himself that his mother had always taught him that every decision represented an opportunity to pick the high road or the low one.

Staring at the tape he was winding around his leg, he reflected with a guilty pang that both she and his father would be disappointed with how many times he had chosen to take the low road today. If his parents had witnessed him about to throw a punch at a coach he had for more than four years, they would have shaken their heads and exclaimed that they _surely _had taught him better than that. Anything that would make his parents cringe with shame was something he had to apologize for, even if he never got an apology or explanation from Herb for what had transpired in the locker room.

"I'm sorry for attacking you earlier." Mac stopped taping his thigh and forced himself to meet his coach's inscrutable gaze. "No matter what you said, I know it wasn't appropriate for me to try to take a swing at you, and I hope that you can forgive me."

"You're right. What you did was completely out of line, and it was both the first _and_ the last time you'll ever do it to me." Herb's stern glare could have peeled paint, but Mac didn't feel as intimidated as he might have in other circumstances. After all, he would only be playing for Herb until the end of the Olympics, and he could probably restrain himself from throwing any more punches at the man until that timeframe had elapsed. He had that much self-control, at least. "I won't tolerate being assaulted by my own players."

"Got it." Mac gave a short nod of understanding, hoping that Herb would leave now that he had made his point, so that Mac could return to taping his leg in peace. "It won't happen again."

"That being said, I would probably have thrown a punch at a coach who called me a quitter if I felt like he had plenty of proof that I wasn't." Herb's flinty expression melted into a faint smile, and Mac found himself wondering, _Now that you're looking down upon me after all these years, are you proud of who I am? _

Somehow, even after all the abuse Herb had heaped upon him over the course of four long years, the abrasive man's approval mattered to him even more than it had as a freshman at the U. Still, he had too much pride and common sense to pose such a question to Coach Brooks, but maybe Herb could read the forever unspoken question in his eyes.

"You're a hell of a hockey player, Robbie." Herb squeezed Mac's shoulder in the only sign of affection he ever allowed himself to show toward his players. "Tonight was no exception."

His head spinning at the utterly unexpected compliment, Mac didn't know whether to laugh or cry, which he supposed was further evidence of the adrenaline crash he had experienced once the game with Sweden ended, and compromised by giving a ghost of a smile. He might not bring home a medal, but he had to have attained a certain level of Olympic greatness to earn a rare bit of praise from Herb. Coach Brooks had told him he was a hell of a hockey player, and, with every particle in his being, Mac knew that he would carry those words around in his heart like a battle scar and a badge of honor.

"I've had good coaches," Mac said once he was confident that his tone wouldn't tremble, because, where he was from, nobody liked a person who didn't have the humility necessary to flip a compliment back on its giver. Besides, he told himself, the truth wasn't flattery. "And you're the best coach I've ever had. You can always make me do more than I thought I could."

"A coach can only pull out what already exists in a player." Herb had fallen back into his clinical, impersonal voice, and Mac supposed that all good moments must come to an end, as his coach pointed at the tape around his leg, remarking tersely, "I'll leave you to wrap your leg without any more distractions, so that we can leave the rink some time before tomorrow evening."

"I'm not that finicky about tape," muttered Mac, wrinkling his nose and resuming the task of wrapping his leg. "I'm just conscientious about the little things in life."


End file.
